“Springtime for Hitler,” the Sequel?

Last Thursday, in Haifa, Israel, Hava Hershkovitz, a seventy-nine-year-old Romanian-born grandmother who survived the Second World War in a Russian detention camp but lost most of her family to the Nazis, was crowned Miss Holocaust Survivor. She was one of fourteen finalists competing for the title, and for the prize of an all-expenses-paid weekend at a five-star hotel.

The contestants—chosen from some five hundred applicants (in a country with two hundred and seventy thousand Jews who made it out of the war alive)—were seventy-four to ninety-seven years old. None of them was an actual “Miss”: they were wives or widows, some with great-grandchildren.

A cosmetics company (later criticized for using the event as a marketing platform) provided makeup artists to prep the contestants for their moment in the spotlight. A former Miss Israel coached them on how to walk the red carpet. Each woman wore a black evening gown accessorized by sparkly jewelry, and a blue-and-white sash with a number on it. The judges were three beauty queens and a geriatric psychiatrist. They selected the winner based, in part (ten per cent the sponsors said), on her looks, and ninety per cent on the story of her experience in a camp, a ghetto, or in hiding, then of rebuilding a life in Israel after the war.

The pageant was worse than tasteless in the eyes of many. (“Ghastly” and “macabre” were among the adjectives used to describe it.) But the next morning, I got an e-mail from a friend of mine in the movie business. “I thought, at first, this had to be a satire,” he wrote. “You cull a minyan’s worth of good-looking old Jewish ladies from a big pool of less desirable specimens; you put them on show wearing blue numbers; and the prize for the best story of their ordeal is a weekend at a fancy hotel? It’s like ‘Springtime for Hitler.’” (That’s the hilariously appalling musical that Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, a hapless duo of failed Broadway impresarios, cook up in Mel Brooks’s black comedy, “The Producers,” counting on the play to bomb, so that they can defraud their investors.) “Then,” he went on, “I thought it would make a great sequel. Max is romancing a wealthy Holocaust survivor on her last legs. He decides to produce a beauty pageant that will be fixed so she’ll win. It’s such a success that he launches a franchise: Miss Rwanda Genocide Survivor, Miss Sex-Trafficking Survivor, Miss Land-mine Survivor.” (The best ideas, however, are often taken. There actually have been “Miss Land-mine Survivor” pageants in Cambodia and Angola.)

People who were shocked by the “Miss Holocaust” pageant may be too young to remember a wildly popular program that aired on American radio, then on television, for almost twenty years (1945-1964), “Queen for a Day,” on which a fetching, if sorry, lot of female contestants competed for free medical care, often for their sick children; groceries; appliances; clothing; and other prizes by telling their stories of adversity to a studio audience, which registered its votes for the best sob story on an applause meter. The woman with the worst tale of woe and most engagingly pathetic air usually carried the day, weeping copiously as she was crowned.

The popularity in this country of reality shows like “The Bachelor” and “The Jersey Shore,” (not to mention our own “Survivor”), testifies to the insatiable appetite of the public for titillating, demeaning, if not sadistic, spectacles, many involving “Misses” in various stages of undress—though this is hardly a modern phenomenon. P. T. Barnum produced the first American beauty pageant, in 1854 (it was closed down after an outcry). And the Romans staged gladiatorial contests among naked pregnant women—Lydian slaves—who fought to the death. They, of course, were not volunteers—and they were unlikely to have subscribed to the philosophy of Shimon Sabag, producer of the Haifa contest: “Always look at life with a smile.”